~ 84 ~ ISSN Print: 2394-7500 ISSN Online: 2394-5869 Impact Factor: 5.2 IJAR 2019; 5(1): 84-91 www.allresearchjournal.com Received: 12-11-2018 Accepted: 16-12-2018 Atri Saha Assistant Professor, Vidyasagar College for Women, Kolkata, West Bengal, India Correspondence Atri Saha Assistant Professor, Vidyasagar College for Women, Kolkata, West Bengal, India Democracy: A strategy in Nehru’s foreign policy Atri Saha Abstract Democracy informed Nehru’s foreign policy, as he routinely informed Lok-sabha about his initiatives related to the foreign policy of India to achieve greater legitimacy in favor of his leadership as well as his foreign and domestic policies. Thus, democracy of Nehru had had a strategic significance for his foreign policy. But the basic research question is why his strategic significance failed to solve India- China dispute and other matters related to external and internal affair? Thus, to find the answer of these following quarries, we went through several biographies and original writings of Nehru, we found that Nehru’s failure were not rooted in his democratic strategies. Thus, the hypothesis is that Nehru’s failures were due to the inconsistencies present within the philosophical premises which formed the framework of Nehru’s foreign policy. Keywords: Democracy, foreign policy, philosophical premises, Panchasheel, non-alignment Introduction India is the world largest democratic nation. It was a contribution of Nehru the first Prime Minister of India who tended to adhere to certain democratic path in formulation of his foreign policy. One of the very important aspects of Nehru’s foreign policy was t he consensus he was able to build around it. This consensus was democratically acquired in the sense that although external affairs belong exclusively to the union list and the competence of central government, Nehru regularly informed the representatives of the people in Lok Sabha by delivering long speeches on what he was going to do in matters of foreign policy. Nehru’s approach in this regard helped him to achieve greater legitimacy in favor his internal, external and even economic policy. There were some examples of his time where the rulers subscribed to the same policy (e.g. Non-Alignment) but had not care for acquiring democratic legitimacy. The cases in point are Yugoslavia and Egypt. Thus, democracy for Nehru obviously had a strategic significance for his foreign policy. In this chapter we will first deal with Nehru’s concept and approach to democracy in general. Secondly, we will discuss how Nehru uses the democracy as a strategy to peruse his countries national interest. The sources to be consulted in this regard are primarily Nehru’s own writings, supplemented by commentaries and interpretations. A brief but critical glance at the existing literature shows that the scholars like Frank Mores (1959) [i] , Gopal (1989) [ii] and M.J Akbar (1988) [iii] have highlighted only self- determination that Nehru always is thought to have urged by giving the right to the people of India to frame their own constitution without any external interference and must have the right to guide their own policies. But no scholars neither recent foreign policy writers like Pant (2016), Sumit Ganguly (2010) nor the biographers of Nehru like Gopal, Mickle Breacher, Frank Moraes have highlighted on the point that how Nehru applied Democracy in order to build consciousness within the citizens of India and to inform every members of Lok Sabha about the decisions which he used to take in the sector of foreign and internal policy, so that by democratic means he can make people’s representative and citizens in favor of his policies. Rather, biographers have only discussed about the external and internal decision taken by Nehru periodically where as the foreign policy writers were totally concerned in pointing out the cause behind the failure of Nehru’s objectives of foreign policy but none take any kind of initiatives to discuss about democratic decisions of Nehru in his foreign and internal affairs and none have tried to analyze that how Nehru used democracy as one of the paradigm in Nehru’s foreign policies. Nehru’s consciousness building in favor of his policy by using the term-democracy was not only applicable in his internal policy but he used this International Journal of Applied Research 2019; 5(1): 84-91